61% of Angola's urban population lives below the poverty line Photograph: Sebasti

We have the vision and resources to eradicate AIDS and extreme poverty. It is time to act.

THERE ARE RARE moments when big changes become possible. A confluence
of political circumstances, demographics, a bit of zeitgeist and the rarest
things of all - strong, proactive popular movements pushing for progress
from political leaders. It is just possible that 2005 is one of those
moments. If we are to take advantage of this then there is a lot of work
to do in a short space of time.

The change on the cards is immense and structural. At the Millennium
Summit in 2000 world leaders - all of them - signed up for a collection
of goals known as the Millennium Development Goals. This clunky moniker
hosts seven goals which non-industrialised countries are supposed to achieve
by the year 2015. Goal Eight is the industrialised world's goal - to offer
the poorest non-industrialised nations sufficient debt cancellation, increased
and improved aid and trade reform, such that no country truly committed
to halving poverty by 2015 should lack the resources or opportunities
to do so. That goal, halving poverty, is itself just a milestone on the
way to the true vision - a world without extreme poverty, in our generation.
It's just about the biggest vision possible.

Should Homo sapiens last long enough, some time in the next century our
era will be remembered as a patchwork of great progress and terrible moral
myopia. At the same time as we fought back polio and beat smallpox we
let AIDS wreak havoc on the world's poorest populations. At the same time
as responding with such generosity to the latest televised disaster we
largely ignored the ongoing silent tsunamis, the grinding poverty which
kills 30,000 children a day. Our job this year is to make serious progress
in ironing out the wrinkles in the quilt of our consciousness that allow
us to ignore the mass dying, in our time, of our fellow humans.

Malthusians may say "I told you so", and some environmental
determinists may acknowledge these death rates simply as Gaia's steady
hand managing what they see as the rampant cancer of humanity. But it's
the poor who die. And it's the wealthy who have the leisure time to read
Utopian literature. We clearly have a dual task and should accept no trade-off.
On the one hand, a more just world in which no woman, man or child dies
for want of basic needs; on the other, a more sustainable humanity.

UNDER PRESSURE FROM a strong domestic civil society movement, UK Prime
Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor Gordon Brown have made development,
and specifically tackling the structural cause of poverty in Africa, the
key item on the G8 agenda for the summit in Gleneagles in early July.
Blair has also made climate change a key item on the G8 agenda. Then in
September 2005 there will be the five-year review of the UN Millennium
Summit, at which donors and development partners will be held accountable
for delivering their aid commitments since 2000. Finally there will be
the December meeting of the World Trade Organization, which must deliver
a better trade deal for the poorest regions.

To many it may seem that really big structural change is anathema to
the dirty deal-making of politics at such a high level. In part that is
a self-fulfilling prophecy. I was fortunate enough to play a role in the
global Jubilee movement in the build-up to the millennium, and have seen
at first hand the ability of movements to shape and deepen high-level
political agendas. Building on Jubilee, the anti-apartheid movement and
the social justice traditions going back to abolitionism, universal suffrage
and the civil rights movement, there is a rebirth of popular action around
the idea of ours being the generation to beat extreme poverty. It is an
onerous and inspiring thought. Ours is the first generation that has the
resources, the technology and sufficient experience of past follies to
actually achieve this extraordinarily lofty goal. Because we can, therefore
we must. In many ways what is being described is simply the next step
in the journey of equality, part of our collective growing-up. In the
UK this has become known as the Make Poverty History campaign, and in
the US it is known as the ONE Campaign, and globally, the Global Call
to Action Against Poverty. The agenda is decisive:

Drop the debt

We did not deliver a debt jubilee for the poorest nations in the year
2000. The programme cobbled together at the time has delivered some good
results, and shows that debt cancellation can work, but not enough was
cancelled. Still too many countries pay too much to the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank in particular, and these debts
need to be dropped, in part through replenishments from donor nations,
in part through the use of IMF gold reserves - which can take place without
impacting global gold prices.

Double effective aid

Much aid has been wasted over the last fifty years and nobody should pretend
otherwise. But the waste was in part due to donors' own faulty designs
and intentions. Whether by propping up our Cold War corrupt allies or
by trying to prove the latest development fad, we have squandered billions.
But finally we have learned how to help get it right. The key is accountable
governance and transparency, in part enforced by an enhanced role for
civil society in the decision-making processes. Using these more effective
means and for a tiny fraction of the wealth of the richest nations, a
mere half a pence in a pound or 0.5% of our collective wealth, citizens
in the wealthier nations can put every child in primary school, provide
clean water to one billion people, beat AIDS, TB and malaria and halve
global hunger, all in ten years! At the moment on average we give about
0.25% of our wealth in aid, and much of that is poorly directed for geopolitical
purposes and unrelated to humanitarian or development needs. And indeed
all OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) nations
promised over three decades ago to increase aid levels to 0.7% of national
wealth. Only a handful have achieved that goal, with only three more promising
to do so under clear timetables over the next few years (Ireland, UK,
France).

Trade justice

The challenge here is to enable the poorest regions to benefit from international
trade where appropriate and yet allow them the special and differential
treatment necessary so that they can develop strategic sectors of their
own - so that they are not solely dependent upon producing primary products
such as basic foodstuffs.

That said, the great insanities in the current system are such things
as the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy and the US Farm Bill
through which agro-industrial overproduction is heavily subsidised, and
then these artificially low-priced products dumped on non-industrialised
countries, thereby undermining local producers. The fixes here must also
deal with environmental concerns. By de-linking subsidies from producing
items which undermine rural producers in developing countries and instead
linking subsidies to better environmental stewardship, a win-win situation
is possible.

Stop AIDS

We have made a start, with British, American and Canadian governments
making AIDS a relative priority, but much more needs to be done to beat
back this plague, especially in Africa, and to stop it from escalating
in many parts of Asia. Now, over 700,000 people are on lifesaving anti-AIDS
anti-retroviral drugs, a 200,000 increase from last summer. This is a
big improvement, but a modest step when you consider that over 6,000 people
die of AIDS each day in Africa alone and nearly six million people worldwide
are in need of anti-retrovirals right now. Especially in Africa, achieving
the other Millennium Goals depends in part on ensuring that we beat AIDS,
as it is wiping out the farmers, teachers, nurses and entrepreneurs in
whom all hope for the future resides.

IN EACH NATION, indigenous movements are taking shape to pressure their
political leaders. It is particularly important they do so initially in
the G8 - the wealthiest nations who sadly still make the key decisions
affecting the global economy and polity. Indeed every individual's action
counts. Please start by joining the campaign yourself and by taking actions
such as writing to the members of the G8. You can find out how to do this
by going to

For those for whom compassion, justice and environmental sustainability
are not necessary or sufficient grounds for such systemic change, there
are more chillingly persuasive arguments. It is the desperation of extreme
poverty that also encourages environmentally unsustainable practices amongst
the poorest communities. Above all it is the poorest nations that also
become the weakest, and the most prone to state-failure. When this happens
a nation-state loses control of its borders, and drug dealers, arms dealers
and extremists take over. It is these arguments that appeal to the US
State Department and National Security Council, and that are the newer
factors encouraging big-picture proposals to restructure not only a better
world, but also a more stable and safer world.

On 1st July 2005, a few days before the G8 Summit in Scotland, we hope
all those in agreement with the campaign will wear a white armband - available
online at the website addresses noted above. Thereafter what we achieve
will depend upon the degree to which there is agreement that ours is the
first generation that can actually beat AIDS and extreme poverty: because
if we agree that we can, surely therefore we must. o